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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It’s going to turn out that a nation of billions can, surprisingly, figure out how to make chips domestically once it is no longer possible obtain them efficiently from external markets. This might take a few years to ramp up but it will happen and the market will be flooded.

    Most people I’ve talked to on forums like this believe it is impossible for various reasons that center around technical competence.

    I am no lover of Chinese governmental policies but this attitude is both racist and risky. I am old enough to remember people saying Japam was only good at copying Western inventions, for example. I also remember a few years later when everyone wanted to learn to speak Japanese and The Book of Five Rings was the hot CEO book of the month.

    China will figure this out.




  • You are probably very new to working in IT/programming if this shocks you and a clause like this is new to you.

    I would ask myself how much a regular salary is worth over the value of a “maybe” idea you are not committed to already.

    My personal advice is spend your time and energy honing your skills to increase your leverage with employers. When you are ready to take an idea to market you’ll need to understand how businesses work, etc. You can learn that at work. Pay attention to everything.


  • I have signed several of these. If you do it on company time or with company resources, it’s theirs. If you do it on your own time with your own stuff, it’s yours.

    You may or may not be shocked to learn how many “personal projects” get done when people are supposed to be doing the work they get paid for or with resources they are effectively stealing from their employer. This isn’t some evil corporate attempt to steal your brilliant work. They are trying to make sure that when you are at work using their stuff you are doing your actual job.

    If you have your own things you want to pitch as products you will be giving over the rights to that the minute you work on it on company time with company resources.

    If your ideas are good, save money, quit, start a start up, and use your connections to make a good deal with them (sell it to them). Or wait until you are a vested shareholder.












  • As a developer, I am absolutely amazed that any of this (all the software you are using, all of it) even works a little. So: no.

    I independently came up with “federation” (as in thought of it but not exactly this, and was building on others work) as the basis for a masters thesis in the early 2000s but left the program to get a job so never saw it through.

    So, no, I am not annoyed. I am amazed, grateful, impressed, and humbled but I am not annoyed.


  • I was about 8. My brother and cousins in their late teens (almost certainly stoned) were hanging out with me while our parents enjoyed a few drinks. This was normal at the time. There was even indoor smoking then!

    Anyway, I’m reading the D&D Monster Manual I got for Christmas and am telling them about dragons. I explain there are dragons that can shoot out clouds of poisonous gas and accidentally let a fart go that I’d been desperately holding in for a while at that point.

    Still the biggest laugh I’ve ever got and it really was an accident.

    We were not the kind of family where anyone let on go in public so it added to the hilarity.


  • Work to live.

    Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don’t want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn’t making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It’s not a great world we’ve made for ourselves.


  • I used to get my hair cut buy these two dudes that owned a little barber shop and every once in a while some shady looking guy would come in and they’d stop mid haircut and go into the back for however long they were gone for. Eventually, the random dude would leave and I’d get my haircut finished. I was working as a cook so I’d show up on line a Tuesday at 11am. Place would be dead otherwise. I grew up around there and I’d been going for a long time so they weren’t worried about me.

    One thing that was crazy about this place is the only magazines were like guns and ammo type magazines. In Canada. Highly unusual. This was back when a barber shop was still likely to have a few “gentlemen’s magazines” lying around. Not them, just guns. :)